Why I Support Isis

Now that I have entered my name on every watch group in the world (by that title to this post) I will quickly give the disclaimer that, of course, I don’t support Isis. Someone recently asked me what would be the group’s proper name in Arabic. My Arabic is rusty these days, so I had to search and work to find the vilest name that I could come up with, in Arabic. It was simply, people whose brains are made of dog shit.

So, I really don’t need to say much to point out how evil and disgusting Isis really is. To be part of that group, you would have to be classified as a sociopath to start with, but that is just the mental health description. The moral explanation is beyond any words that I can conjure up while sitting in this humble coffee shop in the afternoon.

However, I do support Muslim people with my whole heart. Why? Because they are humans, created in God’s image. Because they are created in God’s image, they are deserving of love and respect and that settles it. I feel the same way towards Jews, homosexuals, transgenders, Hindus and any other group that just happens to be human before they became under that secondary label.

I am deeply concerned these days, not about the terrorists coming for us (which has been the same saber rattling within Christendom since Mohammed took Mecca in 630 AD), but about the attitude I am seeing among my Christian friends. Virtually all my evangelical friends are on the same page. I am the misfit or outcast. Their mantra is, “Islam is evil, it is against God . . .  they are all evil and murderous. We must kill them all because we are the shining lights of morality for the world.”

For years, I pondered how on earth could have decent German people allow their country to become so morally corrupt that they could allow Nazism. How could they look the other way when the outcast; Jews, disabled, homosexuals and the like be executed because of their label? I have even met some of these people (I know one now) who lived in Nazi Germany and probably supported their government, at least at the beginning.

I think I now know. It is insidious. It creeps out through the cracks of frustration (over terrorism in the present case) and congeals on this side as camouflaged hate. It is camouflaged by the patriots as standing up for freedom and the American Way (which I think Superman coined). It is veiled by Christians as being on God’s side. But hate is hate. Hate is the fuel of Isis and if we become like them, we are no better than they are.

I think what shocks me the most is that this attitude is one of solidarity among my Christian friends. I am grateful that I go to a church where the dominant attitude is not this way.

How do I explain Isis? Is it a Muslim feature?  I would need a book to explain that clearly but I will just summarize here in closing. If you take a country, say “Zenderland” and subject it to domination by other, far away countries and subject it to injustices (like all countries experience at one time in history or another) you will create a general ill-feeling among the Zenderlanders. As that discontent and anger grows, there will the minority spin-off nut-job groups who allow their anger to go to seed as raw hate. This is human nature. If they want, they can look into their personal philosophies to find the supporting foundation for that anger, to make it metaphysically bigger than themselves. Study the Christian Thirty-Years-War and you will see how we did the same rationalizations, using Christian theology. Yes, there are things within Islam that you can use to support a violent Jihad, even though most Islamic scholars would disagree with that attitude.

This is the mess that we are in. When I even suggest that we, good-ole white skinned, Christian Americans have done injustices to other people groups in our past and we have made some huge political mistakes (like invading Iraq), this really pisses people off. How dare I say that we have anything to do with the horrible evils that we wittiness on TV? My Christian friends get the most pissed at me, and that is where I hear the question, “Why do you support Isis? I thought you were a Christian.”

But is it not a foundational Christian principle, which Jesus himself taught, that we should first look at the log in our own eye?  Of course, what Isis does is pure evil, but does this let us off the hook from taking any moral responsibility?

I am confused. I scratch my head and wonder how could we be so blind. The huge problem of the world is not a shortage of hate and we need to generate more hate to fix it.

(I will double post this here and in my new blog here until people find my new address)

I Have Moved!

I was too busy to maintain one blog, not to mention two. I was required, as a rite of passage for a writer, to have a web page devoted to me as a writer and my book. Now that I have created that space, I will link it here. Once on the front page, you can go under the menu for the blog continuation of this place. So, go here.

Did Jesus Die for Homo Naledi?

I ask this question with the deepest possible meaning. No flippant answer would work here . . . but maybe after years and years of contemplation you could just start to scratch the surface.

Background:  I will give a brief description of the Homo Naledi find but encourage you to follow the story in detail here.  In summary, ancient human ancestors are found and reproduced from small fragments of bone that date back well over 1 million years, and sometimes more than 2 million. However last year a team of anthologists and archeologists asked a couple of amateur spelunkers in South Africa to explore a tiny tunnel in the back of a well explored cave.  What they eventually found, through three long small passages was astounding. 

 This will probably be the greatest find ever in the search of ancient human ancestors.  They have only examined about 10% of the remote cave chamber and have found 17-18 individuals, many near complete skeletons. It is hard to think of a metaphor to describe the value of this find.  Maybe like a prospector spending his entire life, with his donkey and gold pan, searching for one nugget and then stumbles into the vault at Fort Knox.

Not only is this a new, yet undiscovered species, it raises many intriguing questions. First, it is not an ape. The hands and feet of Homo Naledi are almost identical to humans.  But it is certainly not human and, we don’t have DNA yet so we are not sure, probably could not have interbred with humans like the Neanderthal did. The most remarkable thing is that the remains of these 2 million old ancestors could not have been piled up in this remote cave chamber by natural means. For example, there could not have been some type of ancient wolf that only ate Homo Naledis and carried their bones to this cave. There have been no other animal bones discovered in the cave.  There could not have been some type of flood that washed the bodies into the cave. There is scant evidence of water being in that part of cave and no other outside debris that you would certainly have with a flood.  There is only one rational answer, this was a ritualistic burial.  There are some death observances in the animal kingdom, such as elephants, dolphins and possible apes, this entombment is unique, prior to this point, to humans.

So how does Homo Naledi fit into the Christian story?  In most evangelical churches, you can’t even begin to have this rational conversation.  I started to discuss something like this in my old evangelical church and one of the elders said to me, “That evolution stuff is just a bunch of crap.  They created the Neanderthal from a pig’s tooth and clay. Carbon dating has been proven wrong.” Of course they don't use carbon dating to date these ancient inorganic fossils.

I knew that I was no longer talking to a friend but to a chick tract or a Ken Ham video. My friend’s mouth was moving but Ken’s words were coming out.

A lot of people prefer not to think about these difficult questions.  I love them because of my natural curiosity.  They certainly don’t make my theology simpler. It would be nice if the Genies story was more clear and detailed and fit perfectly with the fossil record. It is confusing when things like Homo Naledi walk into the scene, like a Macbethian character walking onto a stage where a futuristic sci-fi play is being performed.

There are so many questions to be asked.  My sense that there was a long process, guided by God as a creative process, to form humans.  I think the Homo Naledi creature was a pre-human and innocent form . . . pre-fallen in other words. But then it raises other theological questions. If sin had not entered, why was death everywhere?  After all, the cave is full of death.

Doubt

As part of my small group, Relevant Christianity, we are going to do a series on doubt.  I'm listening to lectures in preparation for this series.  I listened to one that really was good and wanted to share it.  It is a LAbri lecture and they have asked that we not link directly to their lectures. It is available from their library and is free, however, a donation is suggested.  I will link to their library and then you can search for the title: When Doubts Arise by Jim Paul. You can serach for it by going to the LAbri libarary (http://www.labri-ideas-library.org/search-the-library.asp) 

I will give my personal perspective (not from the lecture) of how we got to this place. It is western culture in a nutshell.  

The Greeks looked into the night sky 3000 years ago and had wonder.  They looked at events of nature and  needed a script to explain. They created the myths and stories around their gods. Their gods were small, somewhat like our Marvel super heroes.

 Pythagoras was born in 570 BC. He was smart but had a gift. He may have been a savant. He saw mathematical patterns everywhere.  The patterns were larger than the Greek gods . . . suggesting that something was bigger than what we see here. This created a problem.

Aristotle born in 384 BC focused on reason and believed that truth came through collecting information through our senses (empiricism) and then using logic to find pure truth.  He believed that perfect truth could be found this way every time.

Plato, originally a student of Aristotle, born in 428 or 427 BC didn’t like Aristotle’s approach to truth. He travelled and studied in a school set up by the disciples of Pythagoras in Sicily. There Plato expanded Pythagoras’ ideas that there was another, more real, realm than we have here, one in the ether. In the ether all things are real verses here, where everything is a mirage or shadow.

Many of the early church followers, leaders and fathers adopted Plato’s ideas because they seemed so similar to the Christian ideas (but was not). Western civilization lived through the Dark Ages as the result of adopting Platonic-Christian metaphysical perspective.

People became starved for knowledge and reason.  South of the Alps, via the Medici family, a new Platonic philosophy was introduced, where human experience or emotion was the other “ether” not the Christian heavenlies. This was the Renaissance and humanism.

North of the Alps, via the influence of the Moors in Spain, Aristotelian logic was reintroduced and taken to the extreme form with the announcement by Descartes (1596) that "Cogito ergo sum."  Meaning, that if my senses can’t perceive it, then it is not real so the only thing I can know for sure is that I exist.

This type of distorted Aristotelian rason led to an extreme empiricism (if you can’t perceive it via your senses it is not real) that had great hopes of optimism (logical positivism). That optimism was dashed in the blood bath of the American Civil War, trenches of WWI where reason created weapons of horrible suffering.  In WWII reason also created the bomb and more catastrophic destruction.  Nazism was the last great social experiment in a pure scientific, logical society (the weak extinguished for the sake of the race).  The passions and morality of humanity could not be factored because they are unseen and thus not real. 

The despondency after these events didn’t lead to a more healthy rationalism, but rationalism being abandoned totally.

Now we live in an age of emotion.  Truth comes to us by feeling.  Christians have adopted the secular society’s views, as they always do.  Now to know God, you must only know Him through your emotions (re-labeled as “spiritual” to make Christians feel more comfortable and hide the fact that they are speaking in truly secular terms).

This is the age of doubt because no one trust reason anymore.  Emotions are wet tissue paper for the support of truth. All truth is now supported by wet tissue paper and doubt abounds, although emotionally suppressed.

Les Années Folles

I started a process of reading novels (somewhat for the first time) about six years ago. I am working my way through the top 100 English novels of all times. A number of these novels were written by the likes of Hemingway, Joyce and Fitzgerald.  I'm now reading a contemporary of theirs,  Saul Bellow.  I'm not sure if Bellow's path ever crossed the aforementioned authors as they were part of the Les Années Folles (the crazy years) in Paris and he was not.  However, all of these authors, plus others like Lowry, wrote of similar experiences and those experiences must have been reflective of their own lives.

As an Evangelical I would look at these people as an example of the hideousness of sin.  Each book is written with the ink of alcohol, depression, divorce, murder, incest and more than a few wars and old fashioned fist-fights.  They were people, often rich people, adrift on a sea of chaos and confusion.

Sometimes, while I don't envy these people . . . or at least I don't think so . . . I really wonder as an evangelical if I really stood on a higher ground.

It reminds me of a poem a patient wrote called An Ode to Prozac.  The  first line of her poem was "The question is to feel . . . or not to feel."

The people living in Les Années Folles of Paris in the 1930s felt.  They felt deeply.  They felt music, art, love, grief, the effects of alcohol and ruin. But they felt.

As an evangelical we were taught not to feel.  Feeling meant we were human and a good Christian, so we thought, were transfigured humans. That of course wasn't true but we had to pretend that it was.  We couldn't feel sad. We couldn't feel pain. We couldn't feel ruin.

While I may not long for the chaos of  all that was there within the lives and worlds of Les Années Folles . . . but maybe enjoy feeling and long for all those years I missed feeling.

Kierkegaard a Prophet f or the Times—Sadly So

We finished our Sunday school class today on Kierkegaard. The class was taught by a son of one of our members, a young man of 24 who grew up in this church. I will be honest and say that his personal opinions, like the writings of Kierkegaard himself, appear opaque at best. There was not a lot of discussion as I think the most in the class had never heard of Kierkegaard.  But as we finished he did seem to support the ideal that Kierkegaard has the answer that this generation is looking for . . . however, I beg to differ.  I did voice my opinion in the class.

Kierkegaard came of age just as the philosophical dystopia of post-rationality begin to emerge.  Descartes and Hegal suns were setting without resolution of the big questions.  The ground was fertile for a new approach to the answers and Kierkegaard answered that call.  As I have pointed out before, it wasn’t that reason was at fault, but the Aristotelian perfect reason, based on pure empiricism, was at fault an impotent of finding truth. 

So now, two hundred years later, the pendulum has reached it further most point from the center, or so we hope.  We live in an age of un-reason. By disengaging in reason, many of the paradoxes of life’s big questions are resolved. This is why eastern religions are so attractive to this age.

So, coming back to Kierkegaard, he really promoted the idea that the existence or the state of being is where faith is realized and it must be disengaged from the finite mind . . . or reason.  It is based in experience and experience alone in other words. 

In his book Frygt og Bæven (Fear and Trembling) he tries to paint the ideal faith, the faith of Abraham, as being played out on the stage of the absurd (sacrificing Isaac, which God was commanding to do, but doing so would be in direct violation of what God said not to do . . . murder).  He tries to make the point that this is how faith or true Christianity must be played out . . . without reason in the bizarre.  My point today in class was that Abraham was acting rationally because he knew God and had walked with God and trusted Him completely, even on a human level may not make sense.

This faith of Kierkegaard is very attractive to this age because it solves so many complexities, 1) The Christian story and the 13 billion year old universe, 2) The seeking of justice and respect for the gay community in the face of hard words in the New Testament that suggest that behavior is sin, 3) The evidence of evolution with the story of Eden and I could on and on. But when you disengage the mind you can find a faith that brings peace. But the peace that faith brings is not the peace of humanity, but the absence of conflict within a question.

On the flip side of Kierkegaardian faith, is that is has no substance.  What does the Kierkegaardian Christian have to say to the Muslim? To the Buddhist? To the pedophile for that matter?  Nothing.  For, those in the different view of life can make the same claim of certainty as the Christian if that certainty is based on the experience of existence within the cloud of the absurd. 

We need to understand that reason is a God-given attribute.  But like love and justice, it is all broken and incomplete but not obsolete. 

Once again not time for proof-reading.  Mike

Is there a Rational Christianity Still Out There . . . Somewhere?

I feel that I live in a world where you can only be a Post-Modern, mystical Christian or not one at all. I realize that the mainstream of secular society has now moved past Post-Modernism into an ill-defined Post-Post Modernism.  However, throughout history, the Church, unfortunately lags behind the mainstream by at least 50 years.

My church is having a class right now on Soren Kierkegaard. The good news is that they are having the class. Few churches would have the insight that the man is worth the time to study . . . and he is. The bad news, I think as it has only met for one week, is that he will be framed as a hero.  Speaking of heroes, my personal one, Francis Schaeffer, saw Kierkegaard as a little less than the philosophical devil.  I can still hear Dr. Schaeffer's voice echoing in my head about the "Kierkegaardian, existentialist leap."  I do believe that Soren was the first step of the Church on the path that eventually led it to mirror what was happening in the post-rationalist in secular society.

Here is how I frame the problem and as always my time is limited.  My hyperactive Saint Bernard (the dog not the man) is in an open top Jeep that I'm watching from across the street at Starbucks. It would only take one poodle to get him to spring out the top and terrorize that town like Cujo.  So I'm sure I will have little (or big) typos that I will not have time to fix.

Western civilization has been defined by Plato and Aristotle. We have been riding on a pendulum, back and forth, for 2500 years.  So we are in a market where there are only two brands of milk. We have the dualism that states this material world is insignificant (from Plato). That is the breeding ground for mysticism because if this world is crap, then all you have is mysticism.  On the other side you have the rationalism of Aristotle.  The Dark Ages were a 1,000 year love affair between the Church and Plato. The enlightenment was a much shorter courtship between western society (the French mostly) and Aristotle.  

Aristotelian rationalism failed (gradually throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). So, because it had no where else to go, the pendulum flew back to transcendent mysticism. Kierkegaard gave the pendulum its first push.

My argument is that Biblical Christianity is neither of the above. It is time that we mature past the Greeks for our metaphysical foundations.  Aristotelian rationalism (if your read his works) was based in empiricism + logic. Empiricism, by definition, limits truth to the material and what our senses can tell us about the material. If the senses can't perceive it, it is not real.  This is the great tension and why most Church thinking has been dominated by Platonism.

Let's take Christianity at face value and try to shed our Greek presuppositions. Imagine that God was there and he was real.  He didn't exist in an inferior place (as Aristotle would see Him) or a superior place (as Plato would see Him) but in the reality of that which is there, both the seen and unseen.  Since God is the author of our rational brains (as an organ) and reason itself (as an abstract mathematical construct) then we could embrace it fully. However, we would not put the limits of Aristotle on our reason that it has to obey the rules of our senses.  That is a true Christianity. But now what we have is this terrible place were to be spiritual we must be mystical and irrational. 

There is tremendous mystery in the universe and there, in that place, is a form of true mysticism. It is not a shapeless mysticism (being defined by our psychological minds for our own benefit) but is has definite boundaries. We just can see those boundaries with our material eyes. Metaphysically I'm talking about things like dark matter and dark energy. But it is far beyond that to things like the mind-boggling size of the universe and then it goes on to ideas such as how God can be the way He is.  He loves us each, knows us well and yet we dwell in a space were we are less than the size of an atom. That is mystery, that is a form of real mysticism. But in this more Biblical way of thinking, truth comes through learning, reading, studying, our senses and our reason. It does not come from rolling your eyes in the back of your head and drifting off into nothingness.

I cannot have a conversation with a modern Christian without them quickly combining psychological magic with Christian spirituality.  They say things like "God spoke to me this morning to do such and such."  Really?  Was it an audible voice?  Was it a feeling?  Does objective truth come though feeling?  I've met many people whose emotions have told them all kinds of lies. Virtually all of this subjective "truth,"  if you deconstruct it, is always narcissistic.  "God spoke to me this morning and told me how wonderful I am and how I'm better than everyone who is different from me.